I was looking in this thread and happened upon an idea: Would it be possible to “save” any old Beta tapes by cracking open the case and rethreading them into a VHS case (assuming you knew what you were doing)?
I don’t think the information is stored on the tape in the same format; weren’t Beta tapes double-sided like audio cassettes?
…however… The VHS player would give you a method of scanning the tape to retrieve the contents; in theeeeeeory you could capture that as a data stream and rearrange it algorithmically to reconstruct the video frames…
It would be a fascinating project.
Mangetout’s first post is very, umm, “creative”. Both VHS and Beta tapse are half inch, helical scan formats. Other than that, they differ a lot. The OP’s proposal is totally and completely infeasible.
As to Mangetout’s 2nd post, umm, even more “creative”. Beta shells are extremely similar to VHS ones. The big difference is the Beta shells are smaller. Note that Sony developed both formats very close together. (And sold off the worst of the 2.) So there’s a lot of similarities.
If you have old Beta tapes you want to watch or convert to DVD get a Beta player. You can buy them on eBay quite easily. I have sold Betas and will sell 2-3 more soon on eBay. You can also scrounge thrift stores and such but that takes a lot of patience and the likelyhood of getting an unusable machine is higher.
eBay Beta hint: Sony machines go for a premium. Sanyos much less so. You can get really nice Toshibas and such for a steal. Also check with palsite on features etc. of the machine you are interested in. Some ads claim a machine is SuperBeta when it isn’t, etc.
If you only want to convert some tapes do this: buy a machine on eBay, convert them, sell the machine on eBay. If you work this way then you should get a really nice one.
Are Beta’s Macromedia encrypted?
If so, you will need a duplicator to transfer them - a VCR will produce a scrambled video signal.
Another solution would be to look in your phone book for "video duplication’ - localy, it goes for roughly $50 per tape, so the price may justify getting whatever equipment you need to DIY.
(and no, a Beta tape will not play in a VHS machine, even if repackaged into a VHS shell - different signal algorithms)
Do you mean Macrovision copy protection? That doesn’t scramble, it fiddles with brightness and vert hold IIRC and can be pretty easily defeated with a signal processor.
No, you can’t crack open the cases and re-spool the brown tape for feeding to a VHS machine. The two systems, Beta and VHS, put their signals on to tape in completely different and incompatible ways, and neither system can make sense of the other’s tape tracks.
It was the Philipps system which was double-sided, so you could flip the cassette over just like an audio cassette and use the ‘other’ side. Both Beta and VHS were ‘single’ sided.
Beta VCRs are immune to Macrovision. Macrovision is based on pecularities of VHS encoding. (And later added as hardware to other devices like DVDs.) But a Macrovision VHS tape can be recorded to a Beta VCR.
I have never heard of any prerecord Beta Macrovision tapes. At best, they would only stop copying to VHS. (And who cares about that.)